LORNA WOKE, DETERMINED to do better today. Or at least finish it.

The surgery was empty, many people miraculously finding their symptoms improving as they prepared to stay indoors for a few days fortified with Quality Street sweets, telly, and the fire on. Jeannie was tidying up and trying to ignore the many, many boxes of chocolate that had landed there—Saif was ridiculously popular, but he didn’t want to take the sweets home, seeing as he neither had a sweet tooth nor had ever gotten used to the amount of sugar Scottish children ate and being keen to spare his children a similar fate—so now they littered the place up. Jeannie had been pressing boxes on people as they’d come in for being “good customers,” but unsurprisingly that had gone down very badly indeed, so she was going to swing past the community hall.

“Oh, hello, Lorna,” she said shrewdly, looking her up and down. There was patently not a thing wrong with the pretty teacher. “He’s not here.”

She realized immediately she’d said the wrong thing.

“Dr. Hussein, I mean,” she said, using his surname, which nobody ever did. “He’s just finishing up his last rounds before the holiday, topping up prescriptions, that kind of thing.”

“Of course,” said Lorna, her courage suddenly deserting her. She couldn’t bear looking foolish in front of Jeannie; she was terrified of giving herself away.

Jeannie, likewise, couldn’t bear the fact that she had guessed, seeing Lorna away every time Saif had booked leave, and busied herself with paperwork. Then something occurred to her. “Everyone’s been dropping off doctor presents! Have you got one too? Is it from the school?”

“Uh, yes,” said Lorna, grateful for a way out. “Sorry . . . we should have got you something.”

Jeannie gestured dryly to the piles of chocolates. “I’m fine, thanks.”

Lorna smiled. “Oh yes.”

She also had plenty of boxes piled up, along with some really not very helpful personally made artwork from children and—thank God—a bottle of island-made gin from the kind family at Rubhan Taigh, who had to make up for their five naughty redheaded chaps somehow.

SAIF SAT IN the car in the shadow of the parking lot, watching her leave. It took everything he had not to jump up, run out. When he saw her face as she left, so sad, and her hands deep in the pockets of her long student-y coat, and the red hair under a black velvet cap that made her look so young, so lovely, so undeserving to be so sad when happiness was always circling and never in reach, he wanted to run to her, grab her, who cares what the world saw.

He looked again at his phone. On his Facebook. Nothing.

WHEN HE FINALLY got back in, Jeannie handed over the little parcel from Lorna with a kind look that bypassed Saif completely. He held on to it as he went home, heated up the lasagna kind Mrs. Laird had left for him, and tried, completely unsuccessfully, to calm down a highly overexcited Ash. There would be presents tomorrow, then they were booked in to the Rock; Flora wouldn’t hear of them having Christmas on their own and had absolutely insisted. Of course it wasn’t entirely unselfish; she wanted the place filled with people she knew would appreciate it, plus Ash could keep Agot distracted, which could only be a good thing.